Three days later he rode with two men through the crusted snow, dark, small figures like brown withered leaves against the white earth.

Imagine this earth, blue and brown and white, turning beneath several thousand geosynchronous satellites.

One moon, then another, peeped through, scattering the white earth with silver.

They rolled, twisted; slipped on the white, wet earth.

They moved the lamplight toward the white earth and the tiny footprints going off, across the softness, toward the dark forest.

Snow lay in great expanses, the telegraph posts strode over the white earth, away under the gloom of the sky.

A white earth, that condensed from the animals' urine, or so they said.

The insects trembled, a dark cloud of them blotting out the white powdery earth.

Clods of brown and white earth and snow flew upward in their wake.

Instead I skirt the perimeter, bordered on both sides of the road by white earth.